The Penguin Dojo
by DezoPenguin
Summary: A collection of random humorous (mostly) omake, drabbles, and one-shots, presented for your entertainment...pretty much completely at random.
1. Show a Girl a Good Time

_A/N #1: I think it's a rule. I start writing fanfiction for a series, and I start generating allegedly humorous omake. Of course, this time I picked a series for which Moczo regularly writes, so I'm held to a higher standard of "humorous."_

_A/N #2: This story is actually a sort-of sequel to another story of mine, "Not the Welcome She Was Expecting," which I wrote for the 2013 Beast's Lair fanfiction contest. It won, so yay, me? But it's an out-and-out lemon, so I won't be posting it at fanfiction-dot-net. But if you're wondering what you missed out on by not reading that one...um...well, it's set post-HF True End, and now Rin is dating Rider._

~X X X~

"Tohsaka, you're supposed to be some kind of genius, right? The once-in-a-generation talent that the Old Man actually as good as bribed the heads of this place so they'd let you walk away from all charges and study here instead? So why do you have so much trouble understanding a two-letter word like 'no'?"

_Deep breaths, Rin_, she told herself. Getting angry wasn't going to help anyone. Particularly, it wouldn't help her.

"But you're the only one I can ask," she repeated for the third time, possibly the fourth. "And you're supposed to be my teacher, after all. It's literally part of your job to educate me."

Waver Velvet, Lord El-Melloi II, was not persuaded by what seemed to Rin to be impeccable logic.

"In _magecraft_, Tohsaka. In case you haven't noticed, the Magus Association does not have a Department of Basic Mobile Phone Usage. And if it did, I wouldn't be _in_ it."

"But who else am I supposed to ask? Most of the people here are no better at this than—"

"You?"

She'd been going to say "a radish," but she supposed that her professor had a point.

"I'd also like to note that being able to successfully connect a Playstation to a television set does not make me an electronics genius, as much as the people around here seem to think that it does."

"'In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,'" she quoted. "So even God makes the point."

"That's not from the Bible; it's from Erasmus." _Damn Kotomine!_ Rin thought, wondering how much other Biblical wisdom he'd neglected to properly source over the years. "There. Education. Now go away."

Once again Rin managed to stifle her frustration.

"Look, sir, I know that it's probably very annoying to be bothered to teach what must seem to you like a basic household activity, but this is very important to me. I really do need to learn how to use my phone's video function, in order to keep a promise that I made."

It would be a cold day in Hell before she told Lord El-Melloi II that the promise in question had been made to her girlfriend, her sister's familiar Rider. Or that the subject of the promise was to "send me something to keep me warm at night while you're in London."

"I'm not going to ask what kind of promise takes a video recording," Waver promptly scored a direct hit. Rin winced, trying very hard not to let any sign of embarrassment show. "Besides, you shouldn't be making promises that you know you aren't able to keep."

"But sir, I need—"

"Have you tried reading the owner's manual? Amazing things, those."

"I did try using the online help function, but it...wasn't a success." _If you can call accidentally downloading eight thousand yen's worth of apps "not a success."_

"O-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!"

Rin's back teeth ground together in a purely reflexive response before her conscious mind had even put a name to the one laughing.

"How very much like you, Tohsaka, to be unable to operate such a simple function. But I suppose that's only to be expected from a lower-class magus like yourself. Perhaps pencil and paper would be a communication method more appropriate to your ability."

Rin's tooth-grinding was probably audible by now.

"Luviagelita Edelfelt."

She turned to face the statuesque (the word causing a momentary fantasy of Luvia staring long and deeply at Rider's Mystic Eyes to pop up) blonde in blue who'd come into the office unnoticed.

"And I suppose that you could do better?"

"Of course I could. The use of simple modern technology is the responsibility of any magus who would live in the world. I'd be ashamed to call myself an Edelfelt if I couldn't do such a simple thing." She covered her mouth with the back of her hand and started _that damned laugh_ again.

"That's perfect, then."

"Eh?" Luvia's laugh cut off halfway as both girls spun towards their professor.

"Edelfelt can teach you, Tohsaka."

"Oh, you can't be serious."

"Of course I am. If this is so all-fired important to you, then you ought to be happy to get a solution to your problem."

"But...that...I..." Rin was suddenly afraid that the horror of the concept _ask Luvia Edelfelt for help_ had broken her brain.

Waver's gaze slid over to Luvia.

"As for you, if you have all this superior knowledge to offer, then this should be easy for you. Now. Shoo."

He actually made the little shooing gesture with his hand. Rin and Luvia glanced at one another, then back at their professor.

Waver cleared his throat.

They shooed.

"Well, _that_ was a colossal waste of time," Rin muttered under her breath as she stalked away. Really, what did the professor think they were _there_ for, if he wouldn't take five damn minutes out of his schedule to teach her something?

"And just where do you think _you're _going?"

She whipped around.

"What the hell are _you_ still doing here?"

"Surely even an uncultured barbarian from the far corners of the globe can figure that out."

"Not really, no. You've already checked 'fuck up Rin Tohsaka's life' off today's to-do list, so I'd have thought you'd be off to teach reindeer to fly or whatever it is you do in your spare time."

"Ohohohoho! No doubt this is the kind of emotional control that got you kicked out of the dorm."

"Well, excuse me for not having seventeen mansions in every world city I can just go to when I screw over someone!"

"Are you claiming I hide behind my family's money?" Luvia shot back.

"If the thousand-euro Parisian designer shoe fits—"

There weren't _actual_ sparks crackling in the air between them. Maybe. Probably. Only little ones, in any case.

Lord El-Melloi II's office door flung open.

"_Kill each other somewhere else, you idiots!_" roared along the hallway, the sound carried along by a torrential wind that left the two magi with hair tousled into clouds.

Rin and Luvia blinked, then looked at each other, then each cracked up laughing at her rival's appearance.

"Marginally better," Waver groused, and his door slammed shut again.

"And that," Luvia concluded, "is why I'm still here."

"Wait; you're taking him seriously?"

"The Edelfelt family has always been proper magi of the Association. It would be a blot on our honor reaching back generations for me to ignore a task assigned to me by my teacher and mentor."

Stripping the typical babble out of Luvia's dialogue and editing for content, Rin tried to analyze the situation logically.

One: Lord El-Melloi II had told Luvia to teach Rin how to use her cell phone.

Corollary to point one: He'd also told Rin, by implication, to _learn_ from Luvia's teaching.

Two: He'd been tipping over the line from "bored" to "exasperated" even before Luvia had come into the office, suggesting that his reaction to any outcome was likely to be slanted against her.

Three: Thanks to the _totally Luvia's fault_ squabble disturbing him, any slack he'd been inclined to offer was pretty much toast at this point.

Conclusion: Rin's inability to overcome her technology issues had suddenly gone from "amusing, occasionally cute if inconvenient personal quirk" to "official assignment as a student at the Clock Tower."

Corollary to conclusion: There were a lot of cute girls in Fuyuki City and while Rider wasn't the kind of petty mythological monster who'd make a fight out of Rin failing to do something, she _was_ the kind of insightful person who got annoyed when Rin's pride and stubbornness made her do self-destructive things.

Rin let out a heavy sigh.

"Come on; I'll show you what I've been having trouble with."

~X X X~

Rider had just been settling into the meat of a mystery novel when the soft purr of her smartphone caught her attention. Somewhat reluctantly—the book was really good—she got up and crossed over to where she'd left it on the table.

_So who's sending me mail at this hour?_ she wondered. Being a Servant, an incarnated spiritual entity, she didn't need to sleep, which gave her six to ten hours a day more than everyone else around her to catch up on life. Which was good, because Medusa had quite a lot of catching up to do. Still, very few people called her at three-thirty in the morning.

Her eyes lit up behind her glasses when she saw who had sent the new mail message.

_From: deredere69 ..._ (Rider suspected she was going to pay when Rin figured out how to read her own address, but it was totally worth it.)

_To: snakylegs ..._

_Subject: Ha!_

_1 attachment_

_Didn't think I could do it, did you? Well, I fully expect your apology when I see you again! Prepare to grovel! Or at least to get on your knees. 3_

Grinning, Rider opened the video file attachment. What greeted her eyes wasn't what she had expected. Or then again, maybe it was.

"So that's it, then? I just push this button here?"

"No, that's the stop button. You push that when you're all done. Weren't you paying attention the first three times I said that?"

"Well, excuse me! It was hard enough to learn what these buttons did just to make a phone call. Now you're telling me that they also do completely different things to be a camera!"

Luvia sniffed.

"They do the _same things_. The call button records. The end call button stops. I'd have thought even an ignorant baboon like you could figure that out!" The blonde's eye was starting to twitch.

"Well, excuse me for caring more about _magecraft_ than how to operate some electric toy. Maybe that's why we beat you down seventy years ago, because you were too busy figuring out the zeppelin or something," Rin shot back.

"Zeppelins started in the 1900s. You can't even get your _insults_ right! Do you even have electricity in that backwoods little hovel you grew up in?"

"You think Buckingham Palace is a hovel, so how is that even an insult?"

"Oh, did that hit the guttersnipe where it hurt? Don't fret; we can't all be dignified ladies."

"What's so dignified about pro wrestling, anyway?"

"_The magical martial arts of the Edelfelt lineage are not professional wrestling!_"

"If the mask fits..."

Rider could actually see the sparks flickering between their eyes as the two young women glared at one another.

The first _Gandr_ shots went flying a moment later. Things got rather chaotic for the next couple of minutes, and the clouds of dust obscured most of the interesting parts until a flailing hand—Rin's, Rider thought—knocked the phone off whatever it was sitting on. Apparently the jolt when it hit the floor was enough to make it stop recording.

It took quite a bit longer for Medusa to stop laughing.

_From: snakylegs ..._

_To: deredere69 ..._

_Subject: RE: Ha!_

_I'm impressed! I didn't realize that you had enough confidence in the strength of our relationship that you'd send me a video of you having fun with another girl!_


	2. A Joker in the Deck of Fate

"Nii-san, you're hurting me!" Sakura Matou whimpered. Her older brother Shinji's grip on her upper arm was too tight and his fingers dug painfully into her bicep.

"And why shouldn't I, after what you've done to me?"

She looked up at him in confusion.

"What...I've done?"

"You came into this house lost and alone! You'd been taken away from your parents and sister and sent here, told that you were a completely different person from now on and that a bunch of strangers were supposed to be your family now. But I took pity on you and treated you like a real sister! Only now—now!" he howled, "I find that you've been a serpent in the cradle all along. A cuckoo in the nest, sent to steal what should have been mine! The Matou family's heritage of magic!" He was absolutely consumed by fury; his hands were shaking.

Sakura looked down at her shoes.

"Oh. You found out about that."

"Of course I found out! How long has it been going on? How long have I been the joke in my own house?"

"It started...right after I first came here."

"Eight years? _Eight goddamned years_ you've been keeping this from me!?"

"G-Grandfather forbade me to tell you," Sakura said in a very small voice. "He said that a magician passes his or her secrets down to only one heir, and that...that..." She broke off, obviously not wanting to finish the sentence.

"Well? What _else_?" Shinji screeched.

"That...he'd adopted me because the Matou bloodline had lost the talent for magic."

"Augh!" He flung her back from him so that she was driven up against the back of her chair. It teetered onto its back legs, but she managed to maintain her balance.

"You stole it!" Shinji howled, pointing at her, his hand shaking. "You stole my birthright from me, left me with nothing!"

"You get very good grades in school, Nii-san, and you're good at athletics, too," Sakura pointed out hopefully. "You could make a great future for yourself in any field you choose, I'm sure!"

"What does that matter? The Matou are a family of magicians! I've spent my whole life striving for this one goal, only to learn...to learn..." Words failed him; Shinji grabbed two fistfuls of his wavy blue hair and yanked in frustration.

"Be careful, Nii-san; you'll hurt yourself!"

An expression of concern from the thief who'd stolen his life's dream was too much for Shinji to take.

"Shut up! I don't want the fake sympathy of the one who did this to me!"

Sakura hung her head, looking down at her hands.

"...You're right."

"What was that?"

She looked up at him, eyes meeting his.

"It's _not_ fair! I've seen you working so hard all by yourself, day after day, poring over all those books even though you weren't getting any training, and how much pride you take in our history. It isn't right that you should have to give up something that means so much to you just because your father couldn't do magic."

Shinji was divided. Part of him wanted to preen at the way the girl was telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. The other part wanted to know what good it would do him.

"So what good does that do me, you admitting it?" The latter part had gotten to his mouth first.

"Well...that is..." Sakura's eyes suddenly lit up and she clapped her hands happily. "I know! I'll start teaching you!"

"Huh?"

"I'll teach you magic! Grandfather has been training me really hard, so I know a lot. And it's only right that the last of the true Matou bloodline learn the Matou magic." She smiled at him, radiant in a way that made Shinji think of puppies gamboling in a field of sunlit daffodils.

"How do I know you're telling the truth?" he said, suspicious of anyone who'd give up the secrets of magic no matter how morally right it was for them to do so.

"We'll start right now!" Sakura opened one of the drawers in the occasional table next to her chair and fished around inside before coming up with a deck of cards. She extracted the pack from the box and whipped through a series of cuts and shuffles so deftly that the cards seemed to blur. "Now, the first thing I'm going to show you is a principle called _equivoque_, or 'forcing' a choice—"

"Wait a minute!" Shinji exploded. "We're talking about magic, and you start showing me card tricks?"

Sakura blinked.

"But...isn't that what you meant?"

"I'm talking about _magic_! The power to reshape reality to my whim! To call upon ancient forces that would shatter the sanity of lesser men! To walk hand-in-hand with death seeking the origin of all things!"

His sister broke into giggles.

"Nii-san, you sound just like Uncle Kariya! Don't tell me it's _his_ old books you've been reading all these years?" She leaned forward and added in a conspiratorial whisper, "I know it's not nice to say, but I think he'd picked up some kind of parasite. He didn't look good _at all_ there at the end. I think it might have affected his mind."

"But...But...The family magic..."

"We've been stage performers for over five hundred years!" Sakura said proudly. She got up, crossed to a bookcase, and took down a massive, leather-bound album. Sakura flipped through it for a bit and turned to Shinji. "See? Here's a clipping from when Grandfather lived in Europe! 'Makiri the Magnificent' played before all the crowned heads of state! Look at these reviews! Did you know that he invented the trained worm act? Even Houdini couldn't figure it out!"

Sakura's chirpy voice sounded remarkably like the noise of a boy's dreams crashing down around his ears, for some reason. Numbly, Shinji reached out and picked up the deck of cards. He'd grown up on expectations of forbidden sorcery, and what he'd gotten was sawing a woman in half. Though sawing someone in half actually sounded fairly good to him at that point, even if he wasn't quite sure who should get the honor. His late uncle maybe. While thinking over the appropriate target of his summary vengeance, he absently began to shuffle the cards.

They exploded in a cloud, cards spinning around him like a flock of butterflies, fluttering down to land on the table, the floor, and his hap.

Sakura shook her head sadly.

"Grandfather says those hand tremors are genetic; everyone in Grandmother's family had them and that's why they had to adopt an outsider. But don't worry, Nii-san," she added brightly, "there's lots of magic you can do even if you do have no talent for slight of hand."


	3. A Matter of Perspective

Rin rolled over and stretched. Her limbs ached, but it was a good ache, the weariness that came with a hard aerobic workout that left her muscles sore, her skin slick, and her hair a tangled, sweat-matted disaster. She smiled up at her workout partner, a lazy, smug smile like a cat that had gotten in trouble but found the prize well worth it.

"That was wonderful, Rider."

She ran her hand along the long, sweeping curve of Rider's thigh. The lilac-haired woman was sitting up in the bed next to her, the Servant's material body not subject to such things as lying exhausted for five minutes after a senses-shattering climax. Rider looked down at Rin, her expression serious.

"I'm not going to leave your sister."

Rin couldn't help herself. She knew it was a stupid thing to do even as it was happening, but she simply couldn't hold herself back from cracking up with laughter.

"I was being serious," Rider drew back, affronted and, Rin thought, a little hurt.

"I know," Rin managed to say between the chuckles. "It's just...just..." She waved her arm, encompassing all around herself. "Under the circumstances, think of how that sounded!"

She had a point. The sordid environment, the tiny, cramped room, the sagging Venetian blinds that didn't quite close properly, the flashing red neon though the gaps from a sign on the building opposite, the coin-operated timer on the TV, the sad little bottles of gels and lubricants lined up on the dresser, the threadbare sheets which Rin had refused to touch without Reinforcing her immune system, it was all a testament to miserable and illicit sex. It wasn't like home in Japan, where love hotels were an accepted, even respectable offshoot of a society where privacy was at a premium. In England, getting a room by the hour usually meant you had a reason why you couldn't openly admit to meeting the other person in one or the other's residence.

Rin (who lived in a dormitory and didn't think bringing a Heroic Spirit into a nest of magi was a good plan) and Rider (who was staying with Shirou and Sakura in their suite and didn't have a room of her own because she didn't need a bed) had their reasons, just not illicit ones. But Rider's comment, under the circumstances, had just been too much for Rin to take.

The look in her eyes said that Rider didn't really appreciate Rin's sense of humor, even after she'd had the joke explained.

"I'm sorry," Rin tried again. "I didn't mean to laugh off what you were saying. It's just...I mean, I know that. You're Sakura's familiar. Of course you're not going to go gallivanting off to London to be with me. And honestly I'd rather not have to keep ducking all those magi at the Clock Tower and trying to hide what you are. Which is not easy, because you do stand out." She put a little bit of a purr into the last sentence and Rider flinched just a hair, getting a hint of color in her cheeks. Medusa might not have been much above average height in Europe, but her beautiful face, exotic hair, and spectacular figure would have turned heads at any size.

But that wasn't the kind of attention Rin was worried about. A Heroic Spirit as a familiar could lead too-curious magi back to her Master, and there were all too many in the Association who'd see Sakura as experimental test material. _And after all Shirou, Rider, and I did to save her, there is no way I'm letting that happen._

"Besides, I don't know how well the familiar link works from half a world away. We can't have you drinking half of London dry to stay alive; that never works. Just look at Dracula."

"That isn't what I mean, either."

The humor drained from Rin's mood in an instant.

"What _do_ you mean?" she asked, a bit hesitantly.

"One of the things the Second Magic does is provide you with a nearly unlimited source of prana, isn't it?"

Rin nodded.

"That's right. It can pull the mana from parallel worlds."

"So...were you thinking that one day, when you'd mastered it, you would take over my contract from Sakura, since you'd be able to maintain me?"

"I had thought about that."

Rider nodded.

"I thought you might have."

"And that's what you meant? That you won't go along with that?"

She nodded again, and Rin felt a sliver of ice seem to slide into her chest.

Even so, she still had to ask.

"Why not?"

She hoped that the trace of a whine in her voice was only in her imagination.

"Sakura needs me."

"Sakura has Shirou," Rin accused. It wasn't fair at all. Her sister had gotten Rin's first love; why did she have to take away Rin's second love as well?

And what did it say about her that she could feel _jealousy_ towards someone who'd had the life of _Sakura Matou_?

But she wasn't concerned about the past. Whatever hell her sister had gone through didn't matter when Rin was worried about the here and now.

"That isn't what I mean." Rider drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and leaned forward, resting her head on them, turned to look at Rin. "You don't need me." She smiled a little sadly. "I'm not sure that you need anyone, really."

Rin opened her mouth to protest, but Rider cut her off.

"You want me," Medusa told her. "That isn't the same as needing. Sakura needs Shirou; she's been so badly hurt that she needs someone with that kind of devotion to remind her what she's worth. And he needs her, too. Having her makes him human."

Rin understood that one well enough.

"Because you can't have priorities, have one thing, one person more valuable than another without a sense of self."

"Mm-hm. But she needs me, too. Shirou loves her, but he doesn't understand her, not from the inside out. He understands _about_ her, but he can't see it from the inside the way I can. He's never been a monster."

"You're not—" Rin started, then stopped. Stupid reflexive platitudes wouldn't help, and neither would lying. She'd just be disrespecting Rider and Sakura alike by ignoring the truth.

"She can tell me things she can't tell Shirou."

_I can tell her things I can't tell you_, Rin heard echoed in her words.

"I can relate to the problems she's having, the things she still feels, the battles she's still fighting. She needs that, even if it's not in words, someone that she can turn to."

_I need that, someone I can turn to._

She wanted to protest, to scream that _she_ needed Rider, too. But the words choked in her throat, because they would have been a lie. Rin _didn't_ need Rider in her life to keep her alive, to preserve her sanity, to allow herself to reach some mental or spiritual or God-knew-what-kind of personal epiphany.

She just needed Rider for her to be happy. And even that _probably_ wouldn't be forever. It was a relationship. They happened. People met, people fell in love. And sometimes people broke up. It was simple. Normal.

And her heart was in her throat, keeping her from saying those six simple words: _Are you breaking up with me?_

But she had to say _something_. She just didn't know _what_. It had to be something true, something from the heart, right? Didn't it?

It was moments like these where Rin wished dearly that one of her most pervasive character traits wasn't a raging tendency to choke in the clutch, to screw up only at the most important times of her life.

_But didn't I just say this was something normal, something ordinary in my life?_ That logic sounded way off to her. Ordinary, normal relationships were still important things. The thought, though, gave Rin an idea. An inspiration, even.

It was probably crazy. But the perspective sounded right, somehow. Something she could actually say was true. And if she was going to go down in flames, she had might as well do it for the right reasons.

She sighed.

Then she said airily, even waving a hand to punctuate it, "Well, I guess I'll just have to accept that my girlfriend's career is as important to her as mine is to me."

Rider's eyebrows rose.

"Well, that's what it comes down to, isn't it?" Rin went on hurriedly. "You don't expect me to give up being a magus for you, do you? So why should I expect you to give up being a familiar for me?"

Rider blinked. Rin wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not, but she figured that (being in London, and all) in for a penny, in for a pound.

"Couples go through this all the time, don't they? Everyone's got more to them than just being someone's lover. A job, family, responsibilities of one kind or another." She tried out a grin. "I hope you didn't think I'd only be satisfied with a housewife just because my first crush was Shirou."

When Rider cracked up, Rin let out a long sigh that she really hoped got lost in the noise of laughter.

"You're an interesting woman, Rin Tohsaka."

"But that's why you love me, right?"

"Let's just say it keeps my attention," Rider chuckled.

"Picky, picky." She felt the smile drain off her face as she couldn't stop herself from saying, "Are we good?"

There was a moment's hesitation, probably while Rider processed that Rin had completely given away how nervous she'd been. But then, she said simply, "Yes, we are." And that was enough.

"Then let's get on to the make-up sex."

"We didn't have a fight," Rider snickered.

"Close enough. And besides, I may not see you for another six months after you go home and I'm not waiting that long for the opportunity."

Rider laughed again, shaking her head.

"What am I going to do with you, Rin?"

"Well, I have some suggestions, but since you're the more experienced person in this area I was hoping you'd have a few ideas of your own. Seriously, Rider, if you keep asking questions like that, you're going to end up losing all your credibility as a _femme fatale_."

Rider hit her in the face with a pillow for that joke. But since she followed up her advantage with other, more creative forms of revenge, Rin decided that she could live with the slur on her sense of humor.


End file.
